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The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

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Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#171

Post by rconti »

onli wrote: post #161
rconti wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I can't parse the multiple negatives of "hopefully this doesn't mean they can't.." followed by "there's no such restriction". I legitimately share the parent's concern. In a related matter, insurance companies are allowed to force me to accept non-OEM parts when my car is repaired. It sucks that someone can crash into me, and force me into taking sub-standard parts.

Hm. There is no restriction in the law about showing the OEM status of parts in general was how I wanted my sentence to be understood. A permanent notice and limiting functionality is explicitly forbidden, but it follows that a dismissable notice (or something like a popup notice triggered in a settings menu) is allowed.

Yeah, this still seems problematic in the case of a device being sold and represented as original. Though I suppose this is always a risk we take buying used.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#172

Post by like_any_other »

miki123211 wrote: post #163
tialaramex wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse val…

The problem with non-genuine parts is that you don't know what they are. Maybe it's literally the same cable from the same factory, but without the logo. Maybe it's the same cable from the same factory, but the Chinese company decided to skimp on materials and quality control on the off-brand ones, and it's going to burn your house down after a year. Maybe it's a competing factory trying to reverse-engineer the desig…

That's what trademarks are for - pick a part from a manufacturer you trust. Of course the legal uncertainty around replacement parts has made it so no well-known brand makes them for anything but their own products, and the anti-consumer-rights propagandists use this to argue it is an intrinsic property of "non-genuine" parts, and we must be protected from making our own choices.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#173

Post by rconti »

Spivak wrote: post #149
rconti wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I can't parse the multiple negatives of "hopefully this doesn't mean they can't.." followed by "there's no such restriction". I legitimately share the parent's concern. In a related matter, insurance companies are allowed to force me to accept non-OEM parts when my car is repaired. It sucks that someone can crash into me, and force me into taking sub-standard parts.

Do you feel the same way about generic drugs being substandard?

Not personally, no, though I am surprised to learn in this thread that it's apparently an issue.

I do know with cars, replacement parts sometimes have fitment issues that cause body shops hassles, driving up labor costs, and having replacement parts devalues a desirable car. (on the other hand, so does ANY bodywork, even with OE parts).

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#174

Post by zbentley »

tialaramex wrote: post #132
onli wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3: > an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss. So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing aga…

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse val…

Depends on the part. Non-OEM laptop memory? Fine. The failure/error rate is usually negligbly higher than OEM if at all.

Non-OEM laptop batteries? Not fine. These very reliably work less well and fail or lose capacity much sooner.

I imagine similar differences exist for many other kinds of parts as well.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#175

Post by zbentley »

aaron_m04 wrote: post #153
zaphar wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also be aware that the in the case of a TPM and fingerprint sensor there are some very important security guarantees that a part must make in order to preserve the security of the system. So it is not in fact scare mongering to try to get this right in the law and commenting about the difficulty of getting this right is not being infected by Apple follower talking points.

Ok, how would you ensure this is right in the law without creating a loophole?

I think this is already covered by a different area of law: false or misleading advertising prevention.

If you buy a TPM that won’t codesign your MacBook’s bootloader (or that uses a compromised signing key) and it was advertised as an equivalent replacement to the OEM’s TPM, that advertising was false. This isn’t much different from buying a smaller hard drive for a computer: just because it works in the machine doesn’t mean it’s as big as the old one, and if it was advertised as 1TB and only stores 500GB, then the advertising is false.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#176

Post by zbentley »

tbrownaw wrote: post #130
onli wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3: > an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss. So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing aga…

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there. "How dare you be anything less than blindly enthusiastic about this obviously good thing, you've clearly been tricked by someone evil."

I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to.

https://techhq.com/2024/02/apple-right-to-repair-oregon-bill... https://doctorow.medium.com/apple-fucked-us-on-right-to-repa...

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#177

Post by dcow »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #124
dcow wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tough luck then. The point of the law is to make it easier for people to repair the things they rightfully own. Not kill business by requiring all companies to indefinitely manufacture parts for anything they’ve ever sold.

So then what does it change? Businesses previously and will continue to negate it in practice, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not. And most of the time nobody outside of a small group will know for sure.

It makes actively preventing repairs (including via software restriction, which happens today) illegal. It clarifies that it is the responsibility of the company providing the product to in good faith facilitate 3rd party repair of the product by providing parts and documentation fairly. This is sadly not the norm for electronics goods hence the whole movement in the first place.
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